Does Citizen Engagement Really Make a Difference? Week 1: Video transcript Featuring John Gaventa Professorial Fellow, Institute of Development Studies and Director of the Coady International Institute and Vice President of International Development at St Francis Xavier University
Does citizen engagement really make a difference? A couple of years ago I and some colleagues did a study where we brought together a hundred cases of citizen engagement in a range of ways; we looked at Citizens engaging in invited spaces with governments and with authorities, we looked at Citizens engaging in their own created spaces in their own communities, in their own community associations, we looked at Citizens engaging through campaigns and social movements, and we asked the question what difference across those could we see? First is in a way obvious but it's very important. Citizen engagement is important because it helps to create citizens. What do we mean..what do I mean by that? Citizens don't just wake up in the morning and say okay today I'm a citizen, I have rights, I know how to make a difference. People have to learn about those rights, people have to learn their skills to make a difference. And how do you learn that? You learn by starting with engagement. So engagement is a process that, when it's working well, strengthens citizen s voices and power to increase their voice and power. Secondly citizen engagement makes a difference because it helps strengthen the capacity of groups to work together. Change doesn't happen just by individuals expressing voice; change happens when they build their own forms of collective action. And again, collective organizations, strong networks, aren t created out of nowhere. They're created through practice, are created through engagement. And those two conditions strong capacity of citizens and strong ability of citizens organizations and networks are the basic building blocks for other forms of citizen engagement to, for citizen engagement to make a difference in the larger world. What we found was when you had those two conditions in place then citizen engagement could be incredibly important for making a difference on development issues such as service delivery, water, education, healthcare, all those sectoral things. Citizen engagement is very important for strengthening governance processes and for deepening democracy, and citizen engagement can be very, very important for helping those institutions to be accountable to the people they re meant to serve. But all those larger level impacts of citizen engagement, um to change macro, to change the larger issues of development, to change governments, to change accountability, don't really happen unless you have those core preconditions on the ground; that is aware citizens who know how to exercise their voice and who are organized together to, to make a difference collectively. So how does citizen engagement help reduce poverty and improve the wellbeing of marginalized communities? All the people, many people who have
worked on poverty understand that poverty is a multidimensional process, so engagement isn't just about dealing with economic poverty, or income poverty, or material poverty, which is very important, but it's also about overcoming social exclusion, it's about overcoming what we know as voice poverty, it's about overcoming inequities in who has power and who, who doesn't. And how can you deal with those multiple aspects of poverty unless people themselves are involved, using their own voices, using their own knowledge. When, it's also about well-being, and again well-being is a multi-dimensional approach, a multi-dimensional concept. I'm very influenced by the work of those who have talked not about reducing poverty, but about strengthening people's own assets. We can look at communities and look at what they don't have, or we can look at communities and ask where are the assets which they can begin to mobilize to improve their own well-being? And that approach gives us a different set of answers. Rather than asking what we can do to help the poor, we can ask the question of: how do poor people strengthen their own lives starting with their own assets, starting with what they have, in order to get what they don't have, in order to get what they need. And that process, and that process citizen engagement is critical, because citizen engagement isn't just the process of engaging with authorities, engaging with institutions. It's also the process of mobilizing one's own assets to build the power from within one's communities, with others, in order to have the power to act, to make a difference in the long term of, of people's lives. So what are the barriers that impede this process? Well there's many barriers. Oftentimes we talk about the barriers as being barriers within the citizenry the citizenry, citizens don't have the core capacities, they don't have the knowledge in order to engage. Those are important; citizens do need to learn their skills, as I ve said. They do need to learn their rights. They do need to build their ability to make a change. But in the study that we did of a hundred case studies of citizen engagement, we actually found that the largest barriers weren t about how citizens engage, it was how institutions responded to that engagement. In too many cases we found that when citizens spoke out and used their voices, their actions to express their concerns, the response ranged from either bureaucratic inertia where people simply didn't listen and nothing happened in that created frustration, or that sometimes stretched more strongly into repercussions and reprisals against those who dared to speak truth to power. And increasingly in societies around the world, the space for civil societies to come together, the safety for citizens to come together and speak out is being diminished. And so one of the key ways that we can enhance citizen engagement and strengthen it isn't about directly supporting citizens, it's about helping to create those larger institutional environments which make speaking out, make
engagement a safe process, a process where people's rights and diversities and differences are respected, and also a process which ultimately brings some kind of response. There s nothing more.so we understand citizen engagement as a two-way process. It's both about voice, but it's also about listening, and it's about response, and that means that there needs to be cultural changes both among citizens to strengthen their power, and confidence to speak out, but equally amongst public officials, government agencies, bureaucrats, to build a culture of responsiveness, a culture of accountability to the citizens who are engaging, because ultimately they have to both work together to create the public goods that will improve the lives of communities. In this day of projectized development, we oftentimes hope that citizens will come into a process, strengthen their voice, learn how to organize, learn how to engage and bingo we ll have a difference all within a 2-3 year time horizon. We did a study of where citizen engagement had been effective in changing national policies, and we chose about 10 very good examples of where citizen engagement really made a difference at the policy level to bring about pro-poor, more socially just change. And what was key in all those cases is the process took a long time. We talked about change processes that last from 10 to 20 years, rather than 2-3 years. And that's very important for the donor-led development process today. We have to be in it for a long haul. We have to look at this not by project cycle to project cycle and budget year to budget year, but recognizing that change does take time. So a lot of the examples that we know about of effective citizen engagement happen in societies that have a long history of democratic openness, that have strong civil societies. So what do we do in those places that those conditions don't exist? Again, in our studies we found some very interesting things. First of all we found that, in places with fragile states and perhaps with long histories of conflict, in fact citizens have learned to work together beneath the radar in quiet ways but ways that are very, very important for building and rebuilding their societies. So I think in any society, no matter how weak the state might be, no matter how small the public space for organized voice might be, there are going to be some small cracks, some small places where citizens will come together to share their voices, to discuss, to take actions, sometimes very publicly, but sometimes very quietly and beneath the radar. I don t know, in the history of citizen participation I don't know of any society in which citizens have not found some spaces in which they can begin to act and to engage. Someone once told me about some the work that I have done is that there's no society that citizens can t at least imagine that the world could be different. And once they start imagining that the world can be different in some way, that it can be improved
in some way, then they can find some small space to help begin to take that action. I think the problem comes that oftentimes we think that the same kind of actions that we see in open, democratic societies, we expect the same kind of actions to happen in different kinds of societies. And that s the mistake. In a society that's ridden by conflict and ridden by fear, and coming out of a long history of authoritarianism, you can t expect that you hold a public meeting and ask people to come and engage and that you will get the same kind of engagement that you would in more open, democratic societies in which citizens are mobilized and able to speak out. So maybe that form of citizen engagement is not the most effective form of citizen engagement there. But there will be some other form of citizen engagement, which can be used and which is relevant to that context. Ultimately citizens themselves become the ones that can decide the kind of participation they want in the space that they want.